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Halliburton Company (HAL) Showing Unusual Social Activity Today

Editor's Note: Any reference to TheStreet Ratings and its underlying recommendation does not reflect the opinion of TheStreet, Inc. or any of its contributors including Jim Cramer or Stephanie Link.

Trade-Ideas LLC identified
Halliburton Company (
HAL) as an unusual social activity candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Halliburton Company as such a stock due to the following factors:

HAL has more that 20x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 4.44 mentions/day.

HAL has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $389.5 million.

Identifying stocks with 'Unusual Social Activity' tends to be a valuable process for traders looking to capitalize on the 'talk of the town' stocks that are basking in far more attention from the StockTwits financial community than normal. Good press? Bad press? It ultimately doesn't matter if it's good or bad if you know how to trade around the sentiment. Certain hedge funds use such data for their proprietary algorithms and it is not uncommon to see shared social sentiment play itself out in a stock's price trend.

Halliburton Company provides a range of services and products for the exploration, development, and production of oil and natural gas to oil and gas companies worldwide. The company operates in two segments, Completion and Production, and Drilling and Evaluation. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 1%. HAL has a PE ratio of 24.7. Currently there are 19 analysts that rate Halliburton Company a buy, 1 analyst rates it a sell, and 5 rate it a hold.

The average volume for Halliburton Company has been 9.7 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Halliburton has a market cap of $44.5 billion and is part of the basic materials sector and energy industry. The stock has a beta of 1.67 and a short float of 1.9% with 2.31 days to cover. Shares are up 40.5% year to date as of the close of trading on Friday.

TheStreet Quant Ratings rates Halliburton Company as a
buy. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, good cash flow from operations and solid stock price performance. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had sub par growth in net income.

Highlights from the ratings report include:

Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 3.5%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 1.1%. This growth in revenue does not appear to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, displayed by a decline in earnings per share.

The current debt-to-equity ratio, 0.31, is low and is below the industry average, implying that there has been successful management of debt levels. To add to this, HAL has a quick ratio of 1.68, which demonstrates the ability of the company to cover short-term liquidity needs.

Compared to its closing price of one year ago, HAL's share price has jumped by 49.25%, exceeding the performance of the broader market during that same time frame. Looking ahead, the stock's sharp rise over the last year has already helped drive it to a level which is relatively expensive compared to the rest of its industry. We feel, however, that other strengths this company displays justify these higher price levels.

Net operating cash flow has significantly increased by 179.80% to $1,122.00 million when compared to the same quarter last year. Despite an increase in cash flow, HALLIBURTON CO's average is still marginally south of the industry average growth rate of 188.87%.

HALLIBURTON CO's earnings per share declined by 13.8% in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company has suffered a declining pattern of earnings per share over the past year. However, we anticipate this trend reversing over the coming year. During the past fiscal year, HALLIBURTON CO reported lower earnings of $2.77 versus $3.26 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($3.21 versus $2.77).